Heat raked her slender body with all the merciful tenderness of an alcoholic Roman gaoler on a bad day. With a groan, Karuka sat up slowly, forcibly swimming her way back to consciousness. She coughed a couple of times, spitting coarse grains of red sand from a mouth that felt like it had been chewing cotton for the past hour.
Slowly she squinted her eyes open, flinching against the glare of the Fallien sun reflected from the sand. With a whump and a shower of coral grains, a goatskin bag landed at her knees, and suddenly a man's shadow fell over her. She snatched the goatskin without hesitation, unplugging it and starting to drink thirstily.
For all of a second. Rather than pure, sweet water, the "liquid" in the bag was a rancid curdled milk mixture. She drank it a mouthful at a time, despite the fact that the taste made her want to choke it all back up. Her body demanded the moisture. When he started speaking, it was in the fluid, foreign tongue of the natives, and she couldn't understand what he was saying or what he wanted.
Her gear and staff were back a few paces behind him, but he hadn't removed the belt that held her rune pouch. Maybe he'd deemed the clay tablets insignificant, if he decided...
She looked up at the man and her eyes widened a fraction. This was the man from her flash of insight. The dangerous man out for blood. And in her curiosity, she had stumbled blindly into his clutches first. That minute of eye contact had made him paranoid, and made her a target.
He looked at her pointedly, demanding an answer, but she just shook her head. "I d'nae understand ye."
The foreign words coming out of the redhead's mouth were all the response Dhiren needed. He didn't wish needless harm upon an observant Fallien girl; no, such a girl could appreciate what he did and become his queen. But the Fallien girl would have understood him when he demanded her name and tribe.
Violently he kicked the skin of yogurt from her hands, sending it squirting out upon the sands. He kicked her again and again, sending her tumbling and not letting her drag herself away from him, however she might claw at the burning sands shifting under her silk-clad body. However she might scurry like a rat from the dread karuku-tal, she could not escape the force of his justice.
His attack was relentless, even if he was just warming up.
The force of his repeated kicks slamming into her chest, back, and exposed abdomen winded Karuka, but the pain of it all quickly blurred into one ignorable mass as her will to survive kicked in and she hurried over the coarse red sand one desperate hand at a time to get to her weapon. The pouch of runes at her side was useless with her so directly under attack, and she wasn't strong enough to match her assailant in a fist fight.
Finally, a particularly brutal kick shoved her within reach of the smooth grip of her staff, and she grabbed onto it desperately. A wild, hard swing connected with Dhiren's knee, forcing him down for a moment. Karuka gladly used that moment to regain her feet, bursting from the ground like an explosion, with sand flying off of her and her sides and battered belly heaving in an effort to consume more of the painfully dry air. Where the dark skinned Fallien man had been relentless in his attack for cruelty's sake, the redheaded Celtic lass lashed out at him again before he could get up because she knew if he went on the offensive again, she wouldn't get another crack at him.
Blow after blow fell with all the force she could muster; she wasn't fighting. She was beating him in the same way she might attack a serpent in her path. The only thing that kept her from breaking his head open like a melon was the fact his arms had lifted to protect it. Slowly, despite the force of her barrage, Dhiren rose to his feet, although his right knee nearly buckled when he first put weight on it. Desperation fueled the last blow he allowed the waif to get in before he wrested her staff from her grip and swung it at her, landing a glancing blow on her shoulder.
With a curse, he flung the weapon aside and lifted his hands. Before the girl could take a step one way or another, her feet were encased in sand, and no matter how she struggled, it kept rising inexorably to consume her. It would burn its way up her body and then crush her in an instant. She would be food for the scorpions.
When Karuka found that she couldn't free herself, she did the last thing she could do in a bid for survival: reach into her rune pouch. Of course, the curious, warm little orb she'd found the night before got in her way, and she tossed it to her right hand, continuing to fumble around in the little leather bag with her left until her fingers grabbed hold of a single tablet.
The sand had already crawled its way up her legs, and she snatched her hand away from the ever-mounting pile of sand that sought to be her final grave. The rune that had come to hand was a little wedge shaped one; the only one she could use this far out in the middle of nowhere. She bit her thumb roughly, ignoring the flash of pain when blood spurted from the wound and onto her rune. Then, as the burning sands climbed up her back and abdomen, she took a deep breath and started the prayer that she hoped would save her life.
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